“I’ll never hold a grudge against the sea.” That’s the title, roughly translated, of an anthology of poetry by a Japanese woman displaced since the March 11 tsunami, set to be published mid-July by Godo Shuppan publishers.
On a similar note: after visiting her grandparents’ town in the wake of the tsunami, 11-year-old Natsuki Iwami wrote a poem about what she found there–“Nothing”–in calligraphy on cardboard, and posted it in the town hall of Yamamoto, Miyagi Prefecture. People are still talking about it.
According to files obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and Aaron Edward Hotchner, a playwright and friend of Ernest Hemingway, the noted author of the Lost Generation was prompted to suicide by suspicions of FBI surveillance and monitoring due to his ties to Cuba.
John Greening in the Times Literary Supplement lauds what he sees as the resurgence of the poetry pamphlet, or chapbook.
Compare Kerouac’s fictional travels with his real ones (or, you know, read On the Road again) with a new app based on the novel from Penguin.
Ruth Franklin writing for Bookforum: “For certain elite readers, the best seller is valuable primarily as a means of calibrating literary taste: We know what is good in part by knowing what is bad. But the sheer ubiquity of the best seller makes it impossible to disregard so easily. If some books are good (read: literary) because they don’t sell, others are just as likely to be judged good (read: entertaining) because they do. ???If I’m a lousy writer, then a hell of a lot of people have got lousy taste,’ Metalious once said.”
Remembering Katrina: six years later, a photographer trespasses and explores the still-abandoned Six Flags New Orleans amusement park.
A collection of essays on the work of David Mitchell is raising questions about the relationship between contemporary literature and academic writing over at The Guardian’s books blog (and talks about a student who was refused permission to write her dissertation on Stephen King).